The new CoD incarnation has arrived to every possible platform and is hoping to steal Battlefield 3's thunder. The series is held in the same esteem as Halo, which can be good or bad depending what type of gamer you are talking to. The reviews are a perfect example of the complaints heard about the games review industry. HEXUS rounded up some examples, where an 80 is the lowest score, with comments like "Modern Warfare 3 doesn't do anything new ..." accompaning a score of 90. The general consensus seems to be that if you like Call of Duty, then you already like this game and probably pre-ordered it.

For those expecting something new, [H]ard|OCP has perhaps the most concise review you will see, "We’ve looked into Modern Warefare 3 and I don’t think we should do any articles on it, would be a waste of our time. The game runs at 150 FPS on a GTX 570 at 2560 4X AA and max settings. It is the same old engine we’ve seen in previous Call of Duty games, DX9, low quality textures, created for the xbox and ported to PC, nothing special about it, no need to waste our time writing an article on performance in it."

"After a year of anticipation, and with pre-order numbers toppling those of 2010’s mega-seller Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has finally launched worldwide.

In conjunction with the release of Activision’s blockbuster first-person shooter, dozens of reviews have hit the web and, by and large, reaction has been extremely positive with many critics praising the game for its signature thrills and entertaining gameplay, though some have expressed a little disappointment at the lack of innovation over previous games."

[H]ard|OCP has been spending a lot of time looking at the same level of the Battlefield 3 single player game, in order to test the performance of 8 GPU setups. Three AMD cards and three NVIDIA cards were tested, with the top two cards also being tested in multiple GPU setups to show the current upper limits of performance. Before they started the testing they also put together a nice guide describing the various settings on the graphics page to ensure you understand what you are tweaking before you start. Gaming at 1920x1200 you can expect to not only get good performance on any of the cards they tested but also have quite a few of the eye candy options turned on. See the actual results at [H].

"Battlefield 3 was released last week to throngs of anxious, eager gamers. The PC version shows PC gamers some love with some awesome lights and DirectX 11 effects. In this article, we're looking at Single Player Campaign gameplay performance and image quality with 8 of the best video card solutions on the market right now."

As many readers of the site will know, the PC Perspective guys have been a “bit” interested in EA’s latest multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) Battlefield 3. Ryan for one has been “testing” Battlefield 3 extensively since the game’s release as he admitted on the latest TWICH podcast.

According to EA, the PC Per staff are not the only ones to enjoy the game (despite some game issues; I’m looking at you Origin) as Battlefield 3 has sold a whopping 5 million copies. It seems as though Battlefield 3 has emerged from the battle against stability issues to win the war and be a successful release. Battlefield 3’s sales have also impressed Electronic Arts who claimed the 5 million copies have surpassed their “best expectations.” Unfortunately, they have yet to release the numbers (that I want to see) concerning the percentage of sales of the PC versus the consoles.

Another bit of positive BF3 news is that almost 99 % of the game stability issues have been fixed. M ore information on the game issues can be found here. Until next time, feel free to hit up the PCPER BF3 platoon and play with some fun people!

For those of you who already know if their machine can get the most out of Battlefield 3; you probably aren't reading this post as you are playing right now. For those of you who have yet succumb to EA's new client and installed BF3 or for those who haven't the time to fully tweak the settings to get the most graphical goodness out of the newest instalment to the Battlefield series, [H]ard|OCP has done quite a bit of work pegging down what performance you can expect. GTX 580s against HD 6970s in both single and multiple card configurations against themselves as well as against each other in single player and they delve into multiplayer settings as well as commenting on the out of game server browser and what it brings to your non-BF3 experience.

"Battlefield 3 just landed to excited gamers everywhere today. We've got a preview of performance in single player mode and a look at multiplayer mode. If you are going to be playing this game today, or this week, you will want to give this a read for a preview of what performance to expect."

Although most of you are busy blasting away at Battlefield 3, there are likely quite a few that are also interested in the RPG genre, and in that vein Kotaku has recently gotten their hands on and released the minimum and recommended system requirements for the upcoming Elder Scrolls: Skyrim PC game. Keep in mind when looking at the recommended system requirements, that they are for running the game at "High" graphics settings and not "Ultra" which will require more powerful specifications.

Those are fairly tame, and most computers around today should be able to at least run the game, with some concessions. The recommended system requirements bump things up a bit for those that prefer shinier graphics in their RPGs.

CPU (Processor)

Quad Core Intel or AMD

GPU (Graphics Card)

DirectX 9 compatible w/ 1GB RAM

AMD 4890 or Nvidia GTX 260 or higher

RAM (System Memory)

4GB

Sound Card

DirectX compatible

OS (Operating System)

Windows XP or 7

Interestingly (though not surprisingly to some), Windows Vista doesn't make the list for recommended specs, which may or may not be a mistake. As you can see, even the recommended specifications aren't too high, at least compared to other (more demanding) new releases this year. Is your PC ready for Skyrim?

Battlefield 3 is nearing its October 25th release date and information about each platform's release is starting to pour in. One notable piece of information concerns the optional hard drive install for the Xbox 360 version of Battlefield 3. We reported earlier that the FPS would come on two DVDs for the Xbox 360, and a BF3 producer had been quoted in stating that the DVDs could be installed to the system to enable "optional high resolution textures." At the time, I had assumed that the optional install would merely boost the (already) HD (high definition) image; however, according to Shack News the game will be only standard definition without the hard drive installation.

Executive producer Partick Bach explains that Battlefield 3 is based around a streaming texture engine where the terrain, textures, and content are all streamed in, and is a new way of doing things on the console (though not the gaming industry as a whole). Unfortunately, it looks like the concern many gamers had in regards to the Xbox 360's DVD drive not being able to stream high quality textures fast enough have been realized. Both the PC and the Playstation 3 on the other hand, are able to stream the necessary HD textures from the hard drive (PC) and Blu-Ray disc (PS3).

Mr. Bach further explains that because there are so many Xbox 360s with either no hard drives or (nearly useless) 4 GB drives, the company had to develop the Xbox version such that even a system with no hard drive could at least play the game, even at the expense of image quality. "You could call it a 'standard-def' version for the 360 if you don't have a hard-drive." What is still unclear is what exactly he means by standard definition. Whether that means the game will be limited to a 480p resolution without the optional hard drive installation or high definition (720p+) resolutions with relatively lower resolution textures is not certain (though likely the later rather than the former, if I had to guess).

What this means for Xbox 360 gamers, in the end, is that the game will be quite a bit more expensive than previously thought if they want the full experience after factoring in the cost of an (outrageously priced) Microsoft hard drive. Are you planning on buying the Xbox version?

For those anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next instalment of the Elder Scrolls, Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN has something you might want to see. Not one, not two, but three whole previews of the game as one of their lucky reviewers plays through a few hours of the game. This latest instalment features our hapless previewer sneaking around in a cave full of bandits in the hopes of determining if that object he saw in the corner of the cave was indeed an anvil. Did he succeed? Read on to find out.

"Last week, I played three hours of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, at my leisure and free to go and do whatever I could. I’m telling a series of anecdotes based on what I saw and did; here’s the first, here is the second and below is the cowardly third."

"NVIDIA’s GeForce.com has posted the first footage from the PC version of Batman: Arkham City. Included are general shots of the game running on a GTX 560 and several side-by-side scenes showing the Hardware Accelerated PhysX effects enabled and disabled."

Keep an eye on the floor as that is where most of the paper fluttering and dust stomping action happens. You can also get a play by play of the action at GeForce.com, which points out what the CUDA cores are doing during the gameplay footage. You'll have to wait until November 15th to try it for yourself.

One of the questions we have been asking about Bulldozer is how much it effects game play performance. We know that for non-multithreaded applications th FX-8150 falls behind the top SandyBridge processors and barely breaks even on heavily multithreaded apps. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will lag behind SandyBridge in gaming as many games do not utilize the CPU enough to make a huge difference, though that premise needs to be proved. Enter Tweaktown who have taken the top Bulldozer and SandyBridge CPUs along with three Sapphire HD 6970 video cards, and placed them in a Maximus IV Extreme-Z and Crosshair V Formula motherboard respectively. With that much graphical power, it is possible to see the performance difference that the CPU and the motherboard chipset have on performance. Read on to see how Bulldozer fared.

"We've already provided a fair bit of coverage on the new FX-8150 CPU from AMD and it hasn't all been favorable for the team over at AMD. If you haven't looked yet, I highly recommend you check out our other pieces that cover the VGA testing side of things and my editorial Shi**y Marketing Killed the Bulldozer Star which has really gained traction over the last few days.

Today we test the video card side of things a bit more and see what goes on when we start to make use of CrossFireX on the 990FX platform. The 990FX chipset shows some good potential and it's going to be interesting to see what happens when we start to make use of all those PCIe lanes that are on offer."